NetApp Data ONTAP GX Implemented by Qualcomm

NetApp announced that Qualcomm, a developer and innovator of advanced wireless technologies and data solutions, has implemented NetApp Data ONTAP GX as the computing storage platform in the company’s chipset design process. NetApp also announced new product enhancements that extend the capabilities of Data ONTAP GX.

In industries such as oil and gas, media and entertainment, and chip design, customers are leveraging Linux, UNIX, and Microsoft Windows compute clusters that run technical applications with demanding storage requirements. These demanding environments often lead to storage hot spots caused by increased activity along with escalating costs associated with managing the storage system. Data ONTAP GX enables customers to avoid these issues by providing a clustered file system that stripes data across all available storage resources, achieving the highest levels of performance. In addition, file system virtualization enables storage optimization and expansion, even across multiple tiers, without disruption to users or applications.

Qualcomm is constantly innovating with new chip designs that enable faster and better video, audio, gaming, and location-based services for wireless devices. During the electronic design automation (EDA) process, engineers run compute-intensive chip simulations. When the compute farm approached maximum utilization, Qualcomm found data input/output (I/O) to be a bottleneck that was impacting the pace of engineering development.

“We wanted to bring more projects online and not have data I/O be the bottleneck,” said Jeff Kennedy, IT engineer at Qualcomm. “We needed a solution that allowed us to bring more compute resources to bear on a single file system or directory structure. After testing various available options, we found that NetApp Data ONTAP GX did a great job of meeting our performance needs and providing the level of availability and failover required to maintain our rapid pace of technology development.”

With Data ONTAP GX, customers can scale to multiple gigabytes per second of I/O throughput and multiple petabytes of capacity while maintaining a single system image. Qualcomm, for example, can span volumes across all system nodes, deliver maximum I/O, and remove the bottlenecks that previously hurt production, thanks to NetApp’s innovative volume striping.

“When we add more nodes to our system, Data ONTAP GX provides near-linear scaling of performance,” said Kennedy. “With our four-node Data ONTAP GX cluster, we now get almost four times the I/O against a single file system or directory structure than previously. Also, with Data ONTAP GX in place we can present a single file system image spanning multiple nodes for engineering projects, allowing our engineers to run multiple simulations without noticing a performance impact.”

Additionally, Data ONTAP GX has eased past scalability issues in Qualcomm’s compute environment. With the ability to seamlessly grow file systems and increase performance concurrently, Qualcomm estimates that it will be able to reduce the time spent in data administration from 40 hours to 10 hours a week with the Data ONTAP GX cluster.

“Success stories like Qualcomm are proof that NetApp Data ONTAP GX enables customers to meet their high-performance computing needs and dramatically improve time to market,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “Overall, we are witnessing strong demand for Data ONTAP GX as our customer base expands from high-performance simulation environments to Web 2.0 and digital media industries—further validating the success of our scale-out storage solution.”

NetApp Expands Industry-Leading Features
of Data ONTAP GX
New enhancements to Data ONTAP GX, which are available immediately, provide customers with broader 10 Gigabit Ethernet support, enabling higher performance and lower latency in both Windows and Linux environments. In addition, Data ONTAP GX now supports disks up to one terabyte in size, and more than doubles maximum system capacity to 14PB, all while reducing power and cooling costs.

The following features strengthen the Data ONTAP GX offering by enhancing performance, flexibility, security, and scalability:

• Support for NetApp FAS3040, FAS3070, FAS6070, and FAS6080 platforms
• Support for multinode scaling with a global namespace and transparent data movement
• Scalable performance for a wide range of application workloads such as SPEC SFS97_R1 V3.0, sequential I/O, random I/O, and others
• Complete set of data protection features, including RAID-DP, Snapshot and restore, NDMP backup/restore, and asynchronous mirroring
• Support for the Storage Acceleration Appliance, which is based on NetApp FlexCache technology, providing customers with better performance and protecting their existing investments without rearchitecting their technical computing environments

NetApp has been the leading innovator of scale-out systems with the following features and offerings that are delivering business breakthroughs and enabling customers to achieve greater speed, value, and efficiency:

• First and only storage system to reach one million SPEC SFS ops in a documented test
• Scale-out NAS systems with the ability to scale to 14PB
• Support for mixed controller and disk (FC and SATA) types within one cluster
• Transparent, nondisruptive data movement between different disk types

For more information about NetApp Data ONTAP GX